![]() Staring through the lens of 2021, it is a lawsuit waiting to happen. That’s a matter of principle.” It’s a punchline. When Bridget finally tells Daniel where to go, in a moment of fist-pumping defiance, she ends up getting hired on a morning TV show by a man who smarmily tells her that in this job, “No one ever gets sacked for shagging the boss. Daniel’s boss is a sex pest, too, an ogler whose nickname is Mr Tits-Pervert. Where the film has aged most noticeably, though, is in the flirtation and affair between Bridget and the caddish Daniel Cleaver, her boss at the publishing house, who leaves a hand casually resting on her bottom at work, and sends emails across the office telling her he likes her tits. Bridget’s character flaws were recognisable to many women, less so to plenty of others, but not there to be particularly condemned or exalted. This is a world before the thinkpiece took hold, before the rabid and rapid assessments of social media. Every problem can be resolved by an emergency committee of friends or family or both, summoned to hash it all out over cigarettes and alcohol. What she has is friendship, and to watch this film during a time of social restrictions is borderline cruel. The film never suggests that either will actually make her happy, no matter how much she pins all of her turn-of-the-century hopes on it. She is striving for something different from life as it is, without quite knowing what will make her happy: to be thinner? To be married? Maybe, but probably not. Bridget is 32, obsessed with her weight and desperate not to become a spinster. The characters smoke at home, at parties, in restaurants, in pubs and in offices, as if it were Mad Men, not London in 2001. Twenty years ago might as well be a century away, not least because of the film’s utter dedication to smoking indoors. It finds its silliness in a world that is no longer the same as it was, for better and for worse. But Bridget Jones’s Diary is almost entirely silly, and even its most serious and profound moments revolve around a subplot concerning Pamela’s midlife crisis, in the form of an affair with an orange-faced shopping channel host. Most television series share any comedy billing with a “-drama” suffix, and it is usually the drama which dominates. Most funny films are either awkward or bittersweet now, saturated with a desire to strike a subtle tone, to make you cry as well as laugh, unsure of which category it would like to be in at the Golden Globes. It is Christmas jumpers, big knickers, turkey buffets, foul-mouthed friends and the ridiculous public spectacle of an inefficient fight. It makes me pine for uncomplicated and unapologetic comedy.
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